Virtual Denver: Twin presentation of twin surveys
For a hint of virtual convention-going, Ying Roselyn Du of Hong Kong Baptist University and Ryan Thornburg of UNC at Chapel Hill already have their Newspaper Division Denver presentation online, using Scribd.com for the paper and Slideshare.net for the presentation on “The gap between online journalism education and practice: The twin surveys.”
Abstract: The gap between journalism education and journalism practice has long been the focus of debates in the field. Amid the emergence of online journalism in the 1990s, the profession’s criticism of journalism education has continued unabated. It is ever important to revisit the old “gap” issue in this new context. This study attempts to examine the discordance between education and practice by comparing online journalism professionals and educators’ perceptions of key skills, concepts, and duties for online journalism. Findings of the twin surveys suggest that differences do exist in the online context.
- Conference paper via Scribd
- Slideshare presentation (including audio)
For the benefit of those of us who are not in Denver, or just for the archives, feel free to add links to other presentations as comments on this post. Also, #aejmc10 is the Twitter “hashtag” participants are using to flag their items from the convention.
Needed: Industrial-Weight Academic Research?
Member of a newspaper family, online media consultant and Syracuse faculty member Vin Crosbie isn’t at AEJMC’s Denver conference this week for a variety of reasons…
Those who are filling in time at the convention browsing the Web will find food for thought in his item, The Media Academic Research Treadmill at Digital Deliverance, recalling newspaper industry exec Earl Wilkinson‘s visits to AEJMC six or seven years ago.
Vin’s item has drawn a few interesting comments on the relative merits of “industry research” and “academic research.”
Further food for thought: I remember posting some of Wilkinson’s materials back then on the original AEJMC Newspaper Division site, where they’re still available under the heading “Research Material”:
http://aejmc.net/newspaper/resources.html
The INMA list of AEJMC research Wilkinson DID find promising is no longer on the INMA.org site at the address we linked to back then, but I did find a copy by using the Archive.org Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030920053327/http://www.inma.org/academicpapers.cfm
From the Newspaper Division’s own Web archives, here are the 2003 documents Wilkinson shared with us:
- Newspapers and Academic Research INMA letter to the Newspaper Division head, Clyde Bentley.
- Results of a research-interests survey of newspaper industry executives (17 pages including 139 comments)
That same year, the Newspaper Division surveyed its members on the question of research interests. Here are quantitative results and Full-text answers
Maybe it’s time for a fresh try at that member survey… It might help with the “What should we call the division?” discussion that has been going on for the past month.
Personal disclosure: My own newspaper-related research is mostly historical, which I have to admit doesn’t do “the industry” much good, except by pointing out that innovation coupled with ethical lapses has sometimes looked good for business, but failed in the long run.
Footnote: For more on current research, check out that same Clyde Bentley’s posts at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri, a regular research roundup.
The Future of News and the Internet, OECD version
The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development offers a 98-page report on “the global newspaper market and its evolution, with a particular view on its economics, the development of online news, related opportunities and challenges and policy approaches.”
Some OECD countries already stepped in to financially help the newspaper industry, while others are debating whether government suppaidort can support a diverse and independent local press.
“Given that almost all OECD countries are currently reflecting on how to approach these issues, this study is designed to provide a platform for further exchange on immediate and longer-term policy development,” the report’s introduction says.
Information: OECD examines the Future of News and the Internet. Full text: “The Future of News and the Internet” (pdf).
Among the report’s observations:
- About 20 out of 30 OECD countries face declining newspaper readership, especially among younger people.
- The largest declines are in the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Canada and Spain.
- Elsewhere, country-by-country and title-by-title data “currently do not lend themselves to make the case for ‘the death of the newspaper,’ in particular if non-OECD countries.”
- “In terms of time spent, Internet users report a large increase in reading online newspapers, but most online readership is more ad hoc, irregular and sporadic than print newspaper readership used to be. The way news is consumed is also radically different on line.”
ONN: Decline of newspapers threatens a lifestyle
How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?
Suggested “bacronym” for LOON: Lovers of Old Newspapers. Count me in…
Bob
Papers win Philip Meyer Journalism Awards
USA Today, The Seattle Times and The Chicago Tribune have been named winners of the 2009 Philip Meyer Journalism Award for investigative reporting using social science research methods.
USA Today took first place with “The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America’s Schools.” The Seattle Times project investigated Washington hostpitals and the drug resistent germ MRSA, while the Tribune team looked into new dangers facint elderly patients in Illinois nursing homes.
An honorable mention went to the Arizona Republic, whose reporters used social network analysis tools to examine a system in which 22 charities and dozens of affiliates moved millions of dollars among themselves while often performing little charitable work.
“Solving” the Future of Journalism Education
If February’s weather kept you away from New York and the Future of Journalism Education conference at the Paley Center for Media, you weren’t alone. But you can still visit the center’s website to see some seven hours of streaming video about the needs of 21st century journalists, including entrepreneurial ideas, new relationships with their audiences, new online tools — and, in the words of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, “an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.”
“By the end of the day, I think we can stop worrying,” Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, told his panel, his tongue firmly in cheek, noting that the event title was “Solving the Challenges of the News Frontier.”
Deans, faculty and students from 14 graduate schools of journalism participated in the Carnegie-funded event which, whether it solved anything or not, certainly featured well-informed and thought-provoking discussions.
From a newspaper perspective, panelists included executives and journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The St. Petersburg Times, the Associated Press and The Guardian, whose New York bureau chief described a contemporary reporting position — his own — in which he can write a 2,000-word analysis in the morning and “tweet” his way through an afternoon typing 140-character online Twitter updates from another news event.
The Future of Journalism Education event (well-Tweeted itself by @paleycenter and others as #paleynews), included an hour-long discussion by Alberto Ibargüen and Vartan Gregorian of the Knight and Carnegie foundations, respectively, and a roundtable on the Carnegie-Knight Initiative‘s News 21 journalism education project. Read more
Live chat: ‘Women in the Newsroom: Burned Out and Fed Up’
Scott Reinardy
The AEJMC will host a an online lunchtime chat about the phenomenon of women journalists leaving newsrooms Thursday, Jan. 21, noon to 12:45 p.m. (EST).
Several women in prominent roles at newspapers — Kelly Davenport of the News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.); Sara Bondioli of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Rachel George of the Star-News (Wilmington, N.C.); and Laura Lane of the Herald Times (Bloomington, Ind.) — will be joined by moderator and educator Scott Reinardy.
Reinardy, an assistant professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, recently authored “Female Journalists More Likely To Leave Newspapers” in the AEJMC’s Newspaper Research Journal.
Reinardy reports in the article that women journalists are far less likely to feel professionally accomplished in their jobs, and far more likely to feel exhaustion and burnout leading to departures, than their male counterparts.
‘Tell Us Something We Don’t Know’ department
New Adweek Media/ Harris Poll…. Click through for the results after teasing yourself with the questions. I hate to spoil the suspense…
TABLE 1
NEWSPAPER READERSHIP
“Approximately how often do you read a daily newspaper, either online or in print?”
Base: All U.S. adults
TABLE 2
PAYING FOR NEWSPAPERS ONLINE
“How much, if anything, would you be willing to pay per month in order to read a daily newspaper’s content online?”
Base: All online adults
Afterthoughts: Of course this is only the Harris Press Release, not the whole survey… But am I the only one who wonders how many readers (given the option) might answer one or both questions differently for local, state or national newspapers? Or might respond differently to questions about certain information rather than generalities like “a daily newspaper’s content”? Or who grimaced at the Adweek Media heading on a question about paying for media through means other than advertising?
PEJ’s “How News Happens” study, “The Wire” and “Deadline USA”
Pressing the police, policing the press started out as a simple blog post about David Simon’s critique of the declining state of hard-news reporting at his old Baltimore Sun.
Then the coincidences started rolling in, with almost all roads leading to Baltimore:
- Stories from reporters in London and Baltimore who decided to compare their police beats.
- A new Project for Excellence in Journalism content-analysis study, “How News Happens,” that concludes that, dimming or not, the Sun is still the center of the city’s news solar system.
Despite my headline, the “police” theme slipped away, but by the end I’d added a bunch of background links about The Wire and Simon’s work at the Sun, plus a bonus audio-only version of a half-century old story about a newspaper living up to its founder’s ideals on the eve of its closing.
If anyone has time at the start of a new semester to take a look, I think you’ll find some interesting material.
At least all the Baltimore references didn’t lead me off searching for Mencken links until just now, for a couple of 96-year-old closing quotes (incidentally, both are from the same article).
On the one hand…
“I know of no subject, save perhaps baseball, on which the average American newspaper, even in the larger cities, discourses with unfailing sense and understanding.”
On the other hand…
“The newspapers discharged broadsides of 12-inch guns to bring down a flock of buzzards — but they brought down the buzzards. They have libeled and lynched the police—but the police are the better for it…”
February proposal deadline for community news symposium
The National Newspaper Association 
and the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media at Kansas State University have issued a call for proposals for the 16th annual Newspapers and Community-Building Symposium.
The symposium will be Sept. 30-Oct. 3, 2010, in Omaha, at the community paper trade associaiton’s annual convention. The deadline to submit one-page proposals is Feb. 12, 2010. Suggested topic areas include newspapers encouraging community involvement, addressing a diverse audience, using new technology, and solving advertising, ethical and legal issues.
“The purpose of the symposium is to bring journalism educators and publishers together in a forum that encourages discussion about current research that is relevant to community newspapers. We seek research and case studies relevant to newspapers with less than 50,000 circulation,” according to the NNA announcement.
Each presenter whose proposal is selected will receive a $250 honorarium. Completed papers will be due July 7, 2010. For submission details and a PDF of the full call, see the NNA or Huck Boyd sites.
